Use rated games to be matched with real players. After a few games that you will lose you will be matched with players against which you have roughly a 50:50 chance of winning / losing. Don’t focus on the ELO rating specifically at the start. Playing against humans is definitely different from the computer. In the lower ELO ranges you will see a lot of moves that don’t make sense and that the chess engine would never play. On the other hand opponents can be quite good at reading your strategy (as opposed to a dumbed-down engine).

Use the Analyse game function after the game to get an idea of the mistakes you made.

I would start with 10 minute games so that you can play a few games in a row (gives you more practice) but still have time to think.

It kind of seems they stole a decade off of Lasker.

Did they control for the fact that being overweight can be a cause to switch from sugar to sweeteners?

Not sure I understand everything, although I think I understand that an influx of new players can totally skew statistics.

It’s worth noting that this is about ELO ratings, so lichess may have a similar problem (I think it might be the case for Blitz on Lichess to suffer from a similar problem), but some of the proposed fixes are FIDE ELO specific (increasing starting ELO).

The problem seems to be that the ELO ratings aren’t accurate to estimate the correct probabilities for a match between a long-time chess player with higher ELO rating and a player from the “Queen’s gambit wave”.

Now the authors seem to paint this as a problem with the new players being underrated, the ELO distribution to be skewed. I agree that this can be a skew, I wonder however if the solution should be to boost ELO ratings of lower-ranked players.

• Overall the best fix would IMHO be to bring together higher-ELO with lower-ELO players in matches in order to allow the ELO distribution to move ELO points down from the upper end, so that the ELO numbers again match the winning-probabilities between two players. I guess there is hesitance to do that because it means the old-guys might lose rating points and people are naturally protective in this regard.
• bumping ELO points would lead to an inflation in ELO rating overall, it does not fix the root cause.

I consider sport and working out to be really helpful for weight loss, primarily for its positive impact on my mental health, which in turn, also helps me to keep up a healthy and restricted diet.

I realize already that the same distance in swimming/running burns fewer calories than when I did them in a less-trained state, which is why my aims are now time-based (45 minute swim, 1h walk, etc.).

A typical mistake people who start to count calories make is to select in the TDEE calculator an active lifestyle and then adding the workout calories on top, which kind of means they are added twice when in reality they need to be accounted for only once. So I decided to pick “sedentary”, even though I work out. Then all workout burnt calories may help in losing weight a little faster, but I don’t risk to plateau due to overeating / wrong estimated calories for a workout.

Also, I do think a lot of advice in dieting should probably distinguish between

• obese people trying to lose weight
• normal weight people trying to lose the christmas-kilos

What works to shed a few pounds may not work to lose 40kgs.

Best of luck on your journey. Its good that you don’t have to do it entirely alone but have support by your Doctor and of course this community!

As Russia’s war of agression drags on